The project will focus on analyzing the current system used by the stores to sell and manage their orders. The project will recommend new system design improvements that will help the businesses take advantage of the forecasted compound annual growth rate in the upcoming years.
The Global Party Supply Rental Market is expected to have a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.18% between 2021 and 2027. The growth will allow the market to reach a total of USD 29.13 billion in 2027. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the global market and caused consumer purchasing behaviors (Party, 2022). The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the transition to the e-Commerce economy. The e-Commerce and digital trade share of total retail sales growth in the United States from 11.8 to 16.1 percent during the first half of 2020 (Covid, 2021). This study aims to identify current Enterprise Systems platforms used by Party Supply and Rental Shop businesses around the San Antonio area.
The project will focus on analyzing the current system used by the stores to sell and manage their orders. The project will recommend new system design improvements that will help the businesses take advantage of the forecasted compound annual growth rate in the upcoming years. The objectives of the new system are the following:
• Provide expedited customer support
• Trigger real-time notifications of new orders and payments received
• Integrate the system into Digital Ads campaigns
• Able to handle customer growth
• Able to use bots
• Capable to perform data analytics
The analysis was based on a total of six different businesses in the Party Supply and Rental shop business segment. All businesses are based out in San Antonio, TX. The business’s focus is the specialized tailor-made balloons and party supply rental for birthdays, weddings, company parties, BBQ parties, and special occasions events. A list of the businesses analyzed for this project is presented in Table 1 which includes the businesses’ names, as shown on Facebook, City, State, and Phone numbers.
The businesses look to become the best choice in the Party Supply and Rental shop business segment for the individual customer and corporate clients in the San Antonio city area. The six businesses base their business strategy on maintaining Facebook, Instagram, and business websites as the main online channels to commercialize their products.
This study will assume that Facebook page objectives are the same as the ones that the businesses are trying to accomplish as Facebook is the only platform on which all the businesses in this study are active. Business objectives are not available to consult as five out of six businesses do not have a physical location listed on their Facebook page.
Table 2 shows the list of businesses with their corresponding Facebook and Instagram IDs. None of the businesses has a direct link or linked its Facebook messenger to WhatsApp.
Facebook pages aim to reach some of the 2.7 billion monthly active users on Facebook. Facebook Business pages are an easier way for small and medium businesses to reach clients in a cost-effective way (Nussey, 2022). A list of the Facebook Business Pages objectives is presented below:
• Reach target customers
• Lower marketing costs
• Able to reach customers on their phones
• Increase Business Awareness
• Increase Sales of products or services
The main reason behind this project is to prepare the Party Supply and Rental shop businesses from San Antonio, TX to capitalize on the forecasted compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.18% between 2021 and 2027 and to take advantage of the e-Commerce and digital trade increase in the United States from 11.8 to 16.1 percent during the first half of 2020 (Covid, 2021).
The current system used by all the businesses has constraints that limit their opportunity to develop and grow organically. The system is not able to capitalize on the benefits that Facebook Business Pages offer to build loyal customers and create product recognition from past clients. The system highly depends on human intervention to answer chats even though five out of the six businesses have activated the messenger auto-response fixture as seen in Table 3 below.
The system does not provide customers with an estimated price on services and products available for sale or rental. The way that the system handles customer requests for pricing takes a long time and might cause a bottleneck during peak days’ requests.
An ideal system will provide clients with a Chatbot Platform that will deliver automatic responses and will be able to filter clients depending on their type of request. The same management chat system should be able to perform data analytics on data collected during chat sessions to increase ROI on targeted marketing campaigns.
All the systems used by the six businesses are mainly based on the Facebook platform. Pequeballoons, boomballoonsa, and balloonsoversa have active Instagram accounts. Softplaysatx, pequeeballoons, Balloonatiks, and BalloonsOverSA have websites promoted on their Facebook accounts. All of them are online and working with except for the pequeeballoons one. The SoftplaySA website is the most advanced one and uses the Squarespace eCommerce platform to host, support and layout the website. The website does a good job showing price information of the products and services that the business provides. The most important page of the website is the Book Form. The Book Form is designed to gather all information needed to accommodate, book, and set up rental equipment provided by SoftplaySA.
Businesses with Instagram and Facebook accounts use both platforms to showcase their previous work and to display contact information like website, phone number, and email. The current system for all the businesses meets the business expectations to some extent but customer experience is poor as some improvements are needed to facilitate sales, customer satisfaction, data analytics, and customer communication.
An analysis of the system’s current performance was done using the total number of Likes and Followers on each of the Facebook and Instagram profiles for each of the businesses. The mommyscakes1982 Facebook ID had the largest amount of Likes and Followings from all the profiles. The boomballoonsa Instagram profile had the highest number of Instagram followers with a total of 4031. The BalloonsOverSA was the only business with a Google Business Profile and a physical address available. The remaining data can be seen in Table 5 below.
Table 5 was used to perform a performance comparison between the actual system for each business and the stores’ objectives. The “reach of target customers’ objective” and “Lower Marketing Costs” were evaluated with the average number of the total Facebook likes and followers.
The Facebook pages with less than 1000 Likes showed a “Needs Improvement” and the ones above 1000 showed a value of “Good”. The “Increase Business Awareness” objective was evaluated with the total number of Instagram followers. The Instagram profiles with less than 1000 were assigned “Needs Improvement”. The businesses with no active Instagram profile were assigned “N/A”. The boomballoonSA business has a total of 4031 followers so its qualification was “Good”. The “Increase Sales” objective was not possible to quantify its performance as no sales data was available.
A summary of the performance comparison for each objective is presented in Table 6.
The system being used by the stores analyzed in this project lacks consistency among them. Some of the business objectives need improvement and others could not be evaluated at all. Some of the root causes of the shortfalls with the system are the following: the system is 100% operated by humans with little interaction from automation tools, missing e-Commerce tools from social media, missing websites, lack of marketing campaigns, and no use of automation messaging platforms.
The new system will focus on solving the root causes responsible for the shortfalls and will emphasize the use of Artificial Intelligence, Data Analytics, and Machine Learning to facilitate the daily tasks of employers to manage the stores and close the performance gaps shown in Table 6.
The current system has access to user data on the Facebook page. The platform allows to visualize mostly descriptive data from customer liking or visiting the page over a period. The data visualization is available for the page administrator to access on the Administrator Menu. Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics is not being used currently.
Create a business process model depicting the existing process of a person ordering decorations and party equipment for a birthday from the Party Supply and Rental shop via the Facebook Page from a smartphone.
The proposed New System Design looks to solve the root causes responsible for the shortfalls with the old system. Table 7 provides a summary of the Root Causes and a Proposed Solution, Tool, or Software for each of the causes.
Social Media is a real ally when trying to start promoting your medium or small businesses. Social Media is free and can provide a lot of exposure for your products and services. At the same time, social media can demand a lot of time from your daily routine and take time from your creative process. Automation tools are the best way to help you manage your social media profiles to increase efficiency, improve your return on investment (ROI), and get better customer satisfaction from your clients (Connell, 2022).
Automation tools are available to some extent within the Facebook and Instagram Platforms. Meta has focused on adding new features to help entrepreneurs develop their businesses. The Meta Business Suite is the answer from Meta to help businesses to manage their social media business activity from one place. The Meta Business Suite is a free tool that helps businesses to manage their Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger activity from one tool (Meta, 2022).
The growth of the Digital Market and Social Media economies have facilitated the creation of social media automation tools. These tools can be used if the Meta Business Suite solution does not meet the requirements of your company or business. Table 8 provides a list of thirteen social media automation tools available on the market to help you manage your social media profiles.
Social media can bring huge dynamism to businesses’ efforts to increase sales. Meta has developed technology capable to help users sell their products and services on its platforms, Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. Meta provides a seller resource library to help entrepreneurs to create their social media shops. It is possible to use social media content as the main advertisement channel for your products by adding sell buttons to digital content (Selling, 2022).
A detailed process of how to enable your Facebook and Instagram shops using Meta technology is provided in Fig 2. The image was provided from a Meta website.
Four of the six businesses analyzed in this project have websites advertised on their social media profiles. Table 3 provides the link for each of those websites. The pbdecorations.com/ website does not work. The Softplaysa’s website uses the SquareSpace platform to support its website.
The website can acquire information from clients and book events for them. The remaining two websites are just informative and do not support interaction between customers and sellers.
Having a well-designed and working website brings a lot of benefits to your business or company. The quality really matters when talking about websites (Council, 2022). The following is a list of the benefits that businesses have when a business website is available:
• Credibility – Increase your business credibility
• Brand – Showcasing your brand
• Leads – Increase sales
• Organic Traffic – Able to show up in Google
• Saving Time + Customer Service – Increase productivity and customer experience
• Updates and Announcements – Information is readily available to customers
• Digital Marketing – Have a landing page for your marketing campaigns
Table 9 provides a list of companies that provide domain hosting for websites. A brief description of each company is available in the second column of the table (Buy, 2021).
The use of automation messaging platforms helps businesses to have a happier customer base. Clients might or might not have a preferred messaging channel so is wise to have your business capable to support any of the most used messaging channels: Messenger, Instagram Direct, Text Messages, and WhatsApp.
This section will focus on reviewing chatbots for WhatsApp the largest real-time messaging app. A chatbot is a software designed to be able to automatically answer predefined questions about products and services. A WhatsApp Bot is available with a WhatsApp Business API.
A bot allows businesses to assist customers 24/7 and help increase productivity and efficiency (How, 2022). A list of the benefits that the WhatsApp bot provides to businesses is presented below:
• Reduce response time
• Automate commonly asked questions
• Automate product suggestions
• Reduce cart abandonment rate
• Help & Support
Several companies provide different solutions to bring chatbots to WhatsAPP. Chatbots are designed to help businesses increase sales and reach more customers on their preferred messaging platform (Landsberg, 2022). A list of eight different Chatbot tools available in the market is provided in Table 10.
The proposed new system architecture will be based on automation tools to help store owners to make their businesses more efficient and help them grow organically. Table 11 provides the e-Commerce process steps and the proposed new system tools. The new design aims to use new technologies to be able to provide more capabilities to the businesses and provided them with a better return on investment.
The new automation tools will be able to provide data analytics for the data acquired during the process. Some of the automation tools perform prescriptive analytics of the data collected. Data sets can be extracted from the automation tools to perform data analytics on different software. Descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics of data set from the new system designed for the Party Supply and Rental shop businesses.
The proposed system design is provided in Figure 3. The process takes into consideration the Chatbot Messaging System and the Automation tool. Both systems will provide more dynamism to the stores.
A proposed management plant to incorporate the new automation tools into the existing system is proposed in Figure 5. The time required would be about 1 week to complete all tasks. The budget for the project would be about $1,000 USD to count for the implementation of the Automation tools and to pay for the first 3 months of membership charges. In addition, an advertising campaign of $20.00 USD per week for three months is considered on the budget.
• “Party Supply Rental Market Research Report by Type, by End-Use, by Region - Global Forecast to 2027 - Cumulative Impact of Covid-19.” Yahoo!, Reportlinker, 10 Jan. 2022, https://www.yahoo.com/now/party-supply-rental-market-research-134300396.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAA9HJwaEvjwhHsW_kIulzcUH3Ro5oAxjoEAfiBC64mPDpRd4UzsoQfx7Osc7krnMwWyNIzU0Ca_ZHdrzYe6ggxF8jIoJAFTnYWOODzhTeFM7fozoaqKfNdDU8O8dKLyYdTu1Q0wOHJGBJEUmn-pTIiX02u6YiuAqWZqFOilhZ9n_
• “Covid-19 and e-Commerce: A Global Review (2021).” COVID-19 and e-Commerce: A Global Review (2021) | APCICT/ESCAP, e United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, 1 Jan. 2021, https://www.unapcict.org/resources/ictd-infobank/covid-19-and-e-commerce-global-review-2021
• “Facebook Ad Objective.” Meta for Business, Meta, 1 Jan. 2022, https://www.facebook.com/business/ads/ad-objectives Nussey, Virginia.
• “7 Steps for Building a Facebook Business Page + Additional Tips.” MobileMonkey, MobileMonkey, 4 May 2022, https://mobilemonkey.com/blog/building-a-facebook-business-page
• Connell, Adam. “13 Best Social Media Automation Tools (Comparison).” Blogging Wizard, Blogging Wizard, 11 Apr. 2022, https://bloggingwizard.com/social-media-automation-tools/
• “Buy a Domain Name with Top Hosting Providers of 2022.” Www.top10.Com, Top10.Com, 15 Aug. 2021, https://www.top10.com/hosting/domainhosting-comparison?utm_source=google&kw=buy+a+website+domain&c=501685428238&t=search&p=&m=e&adpos=&dev=c&devmod=&mobval=0&network=g&campaignid=12443712194&adgroupid=119680620218&targetid=kwd-1208662631&interest=&physical=1010035&feedid=&a=17&ts=hi&topic=&test=&clicktype=&gclid=Cj0KCQjw1N2TBhCOARIsAGVHQc7eIBalo_oAcaRPnZ7wWwhJSe62eDxkgmw3wTO_EEoVHiAcTZjTHXoaAj_-EALw_wcB
• “Sell Products on Facebook and Instagram.” Facebook, Met Business Help Center, 1 Jan. 2022, https://www.facebook.com/business/help/626723211000233
• “About Shops.” Facebook, Meta, 1 Jan. 2022, https://www.facebook.com/business/help/2343035149322466?id=1077620002609475
• Landsberg, Noah. “15 Of the Best Whatsapp Chatbot Tools to Use in 2022.” Influencer Marketing Hub, Influencer Marketing Hub, 15 Mar. 2022, https://influencermarketinghub.com/whatsapp-chatbot-tools/
• “Meta Business Suite: Manage Facebook and Instagram in One Place.” Meta for Business, Meta for Business, 1 Jan. 2022, https://www.facebook.com/business/tools/meta-business-suite
• “Selling across Facebook, Instagram and Messenger.” Meta for Business, Meta for Business, 1 Jan. 2022, https://www.facebook.com/business/shopping. Council, Young Entrepreneur.
• “Council Post: Why Every Business Needs a Website.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 14 Apr. 2022, https://www.forbes.com/sites/theyec/2020/02/03/why-every-business-needs-a-website/?sh=6e89fc296e75
• “How to Build a WhatsApp Bot in 5 Simple Steps [2022].” Freshchat Blog, Freshchat Blog, 2 Mar. 2022, https://www.freshworks.com/live-chat-software/customer-engagement/build-a-whatsapp-bot-blog/